30 in 48 Days!

Greetings,

Hopefully you are having a great Labor Day today. This week I will be sharing with you the exciting trainings I have been involved in over the summer. Yes, it is true that I had the opportunity to take over $11,000 of advanced technology training classes and received 25 software books with lessons, exercises and online files.

Our technology department was so kind and gracious to purchase Summer PassPort Passes from New Horizons Computer Learning Center for a few of our Computer Lab Teachers. New Horizons is a technology learning center where you can take classes for a nominal fee. I participated in almost 30 advance technology classes. Some of the classes included Adobe CS4 software like Photoshop (web and print), Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver and Acrobat. Other classes included, Web Design with XHTML, HTML, CSS and SharePoint Designer 2007.

I can not forget the MS Office 2007 classes I took, which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher and Visual Basics Application (VBA) Programming. VBA is a class where you learn how to create macros or type code in MS Office programs. Out of all these classes I participated in, I had the chance to take Beginning, Intermediate and Advanced classes. Most of the classes were anywhere from 7 hours to 14 hour classes and daily classes would be from 8AM - 4PM, Mon. - Fri.

I knew a lot of the MS Office software programs, but this gave me a chance to brush up and review key concepts, tasks and ideas. I did not realize the value of these classes. If you were to take these classes on average it would cost you around $300 and if you were to take the Adobe classes it could run you nearly $700. What an investment! If I had to add the total instructional hours it would total over 200 hours!

I am sharing this information with you not to impress you, but to impress upon you to really achieve, and reach your goals and to continue to learn in whatever field you are in. I now have build up my technology library and created a reference library. These are invaluable resources and references that will assist me to create additional tasks and exercises for all my teachers and students.

I also met some great instructors and students at New Horizons. I hope to continue my education and attend New Horizons next year to take MS Office 2010 classes and Adobe CS5 classes. For additional resources for your training needs, please visit http://www.newhorizons.com/ or you can get a subscription for online learning video classes at www.atomiclearning.com Hope to see you next week. Have a great week!

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iBlock, template for iPhone

Author: iBlock Template

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Working with Web Site Templates

The quickest way to get your own site online is to use a web site template. You will find however that these come in varying qualities.

You basically have a choice of free or premium templates and the difference in quality can be extreme.

Free templates

Carrying out a quick search for 'free web site templates' in Google returns over 129 million results. It is important to realise however, that almost any template you get for free is either going to be very amateurish or there will probably be some annoying conditions of use. These may include having to link back to the designer's web page from your site, adverts that you cannot delete or restrictions such as not being able to use the design commercially.

If you're really set on getting a free template however, a better way of doing it is to use the ones that come free say, from your hosting provider or HTML editing program. Alternatively you could look at the world of blogs. WordPress for instance, has some very good looking, functional templates.

One last point – do not expect to have a unique site if you use free templates. There are likely to be literally hundreds of other sites online that found the same free template that you did.

Premium templates

Things start to look up when you investigate the realm of premium templates. The idea behind these is that a team of professional designers are paid to produce quality templates that are sold many times over thus enabling the supplier to offer them at a low cost. Much like you would buy wallpaper.

This has benefits for both customers and designers alike. Designers can do what they do best – designing good looking web site templates and not have the distraction of dealing directly with customers. Customers on the other hand get a professionally designed site, speedy service, can see the goods straight away and don’t have to pay expensive daily rates for unique designs. In fact most template shops offer instant download following purchase.

The only drawback from the customers point of view is that their particular design will not be unique, although in practice, this isn’t really a problem due to the sheer number of sites on the web.

Exclusive Templates

If you really want exclusivity most resellers will offer you a separate price to purchase the template as a unique design. Once sold to you the template is immediately withdrawn from sale.

The best template shops offer you a bespoke design service. This typically takes the form of buying one of their templates on a regular or exclusive basis following which you can ask their designers to make alterations to the template. This is to tailor it more to your specific needs which also has the desirable effect of achieving exclusivity at the same time. This is a very cost effective method of web site design.

Author of this article is Trevor Sadowski. Trevor has been building web sites for a couple of years now and has tried various methods to speed up the process. In order to help others Trevor has created a site that offers help and advice on how to build a web site as well as offering free and premium templates of the best quality, free graphics, buttons and other web site components.

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Do You Need An HTML Form?

If you have an internet business, adding a simple HTML form to your website, such as a feedback form or a contact form, can be a tough task. For those who are new to programming, creating a simple form for your website can be difficult.

If you do not have a contact form and you need to immediately provide a way for your visitors to contact you, then you should simply post your email address on your Contact page. However, if you want to create a sophisticated online form to collect information from your visitors and respond to their questions, you will need some help.

Installing the HTML form on your website is the easy part. If you are not familiar with how to create the code for a form, there are many different online tutorials that can teach you how to create the code. After that, you will need to create a file that will process your form after someone fills it out and send the answers to you via email. The code used to process an HTML form is often referred to as Formmail. Formmail is written in a programming language called PHP, which is more advanced than HTML. There are many websites where you can download the Formmail file for free. Formmail has been used to process and email the results of web forms since 1997.

When you download Formmail, make sure it has code that prevents spam from being sent through your HTML form. There are many different versions of Formmail floating around the internet, and some have built-in spam protection while others do not. Many times, inexperienced programmers will put a form on their website that does not include code to at least try to prevent spammers from utilizing the form to send spam to hundreds or even thousands of people. As a result, those who have been spammed complain to their internet service provider, who then directs the complaint to the hosting company that handles your website. This can be a huge problem.

Another problem with Formmail is sometimes it works with certain web hosting companies and not with others. Formmail is written in the PHP programming language, and sometimes certain web hosting companies have certain versions of PHP running on their servers that are not compatible with certain versions of Formmail. In addition, some web hosting companies do not allow the websites they host to use Formmail to process their forms due to the risk of spam being sent through unprotected Formmail files, which can crash a server if too much spam is sent at once.

If you do not have the patience to create a form yourself, there are more than a few form creation tutorials on the internet that provide a simple way for you to create a form without doing any programming. There are also third-party HTML form services that will help you create the form and process it for you on their own servers.

I hope this information will help you decide how you want to get an HTML form up and running on your website. If you do not have the patience to do the work, use an outside service that creates the form for you. If you want to learn to do it on your own, then try creating your form with the help of some online tutorials. Either way, it is important to have an online form so that people have a way to contact you directly through your website.

Author of this article is Jim Pretin. He is the owner of www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make free HTML forms.

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Backstage

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Thanks to Webtalks

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Pink Blooms

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Author: Dan Archibald

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Exhibit

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Author: Deepak Thapliyal

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Iconic

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Design by Carrie Petri

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Stitch

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Created by Lilia Ahner

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Top Secret

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Author: Parker Torrence

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K2

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Adapted from getk2.com

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Kiss

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Author's blog: Oinam Software

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Rawk!

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Created by Liz Lubowitz

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Beckett

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Author: Lilia Ahner

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Newsline

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Created by Carrie Petri

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Compute

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Created by annotea.com

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Curves in Blue

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Created by Bryan Buchs

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Powell Street

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Author: Lilia Ahner

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MrBrown

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Created by Mario Carboni

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Newsline Miniblue

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Created by Carrie Petri

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